With production being condensed into a week, there were a lot of moving parts that were trying to find their way to the finish line. Animation was the bulk of the week followed by shading, lighting, and comp. The latter having difficulties as we have yet to establish our pipeline and trying to complete different parts of it at the same time. With film and games being such an iterative process, this is definitely something we'll be looking into to improve as soon as possible.

Speaking from the animation side of things, this week has been a test for CG animation as the limitations of CG is brought to light. The animators are used to certain tools that we currently do not have that dramatically hindered our workflow. There are ways to work around these problems such as trying to get specific shapes on the characters and workflow shortcuts such as Studio Library, aTools, and the AnimSchool picker. But we were all working with clean versions of Autodesk Maya without any of these savvy tools. Nevertheless we cranked out animation that translated the boards to our 3D environment.

Sometimes, limitations can bear fruit in interesting way. For example, in this shot:

This shot was done in a straight shot marathon using straight ahead without much of a plan besides the Broom needed to enter the screen and end up in the trashcan. Deviating from the original boards and layout, the act of the broom rolling in and crashing into the can came from a combination of needing more energy and through the limitations from an earlier iteration of the Broom rig. Three general shapes were used in order to pull off the actions in order to keep it from being too complex and time consuming. The limitations of CG animation came to light in this project; though the next project we have cooking up might bring to light the limitations of CG's counterpart.